Resilienz in der Regenerativen Landwirtschaft: Theorie und Praxis

Conventional farming practices are the main driver of increasing pressures on planetary boundaries. Regenerative agriculture has the potential to tackle some of the most urgent challenges of our time simultaneously. Resilience is key for a transition towards long-term sustainability in agriculture, describing the capacity of a system to continually change and adapt while remaining within critical thresholds. There are principles for resilience in social-ecological systems, which shall be investigated in the context of regenerative agriculture. Agricultural systems are intrinsically social-ecological, and managing these systems requires a participatory approach. To investigate resilience in regenerative agriculture, a workshop was developed and implemented on three case studies of regenerative farming systems. The system state and dynamics were approached using participatory modelling methods such as fuzzy cognitive mapping and explorative scenario analysis to assess the specific resilience. These steps formed the basis for investigating the system attributes to assess the general resilience. These attributes or principles for resilience in regenerative agriculture were compared to principles for resilience in social-ecological systems. The main objective was to investigate how social-ecological principles are operationalized in regenerative agriculture. Understanding the system is crucial for this investigation and enables furthermore conclusions about problems and solutions for regenerative agriculture in a broader context, as well as the potential for regenerative agriculture to disrupt current critical relationships of conventional agriculture. Similar structures of the case studies have become visible, as well as different focal points in relation to the theory. Social structures such as networks and collaborations turn out to play a central role in transforming economic systems to enable meaningful ecological farming practices while simultaneously building economic viability. The principle of “learning and experimentation” has shown to be the most central in this regard. The consciousness for “slow variables and feedbacks” is the least central principle, indicating that surrounding conditions can also be obstacles for transformation and that there is a need for enabling conditions for a transition towards regenerative practices. The case studies, as examples of best-practice in regenerative agriculture, demonstrate that it is crucial to decrease the resilience of the surrounding system while strengthening one’s own system resilience to become more independent to these structures.